


A Sweet Disorder

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Family, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-18
Updated: 2009-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cleanliness was next to godliness for Casey's grandmother, but there are some things worth rewriting the dictionary for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sweet Disorder

**Author's Note:**

> Written January 2006 for the Pic for 1,000 Annual Multi-fandom Challenge 2006.

Casey was three years old when his grandfather died. He has no memory of the old man. His grandmother, though: she was a constant presence throughout his childhood. She'd come to live with them after the funeral - whose idea that had been, Casey never did find out; he suspects, not his mother's - and it was she, really, who had the raising of Casey. His own mother seemed to fade out of the picture from then onward, too rushed in the mornings to have time to spend with him, coming home late, after his bedtime; he'd wake, sometimes, in the night, to see her sitting in the rocking chair by his window, but then he'd fall back to sleep and never be sure afterwards whether he'd only dreamed her there.

She'd gone back to work, he realised when he was old enough to figure it out. She'd worked in child welfare before Casey came along; as a teenager he speculated, moodily, that perhaps only the one child hadn't been enough for her. (As an adult he wondered if it was simply that she felt the need to flee the house that she could no longer call her own.) Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact was: Grandma McCall was in charge.

And Grandma McCall had strict principles. No-one stayed late in bed on Grandma McCall's watch, not unless they were as close to death's door as made no difference (and, making no difference, not always then). Food was never wasted - _think of the starving children in Africa!_ she'd tell him, and make him sit at the table until he'd cleaned his plate. Television was restricted to an hour a day, and never until he'd shown her his completed homework and she'd checked it (five minutes docked for every incorrect answer). Boys played outside at the weekends; they didn't laze about in their bedrooms, doing heaven-knows-what. He never dared ask for a pet. Grandma's opinions on people who kept dirty animals in their houses were well-known and often firmly voiced.

Their home was never less than immaculate, but in case a speck of dust took it into its head to settle where it wasn't wanted, every spring the entire house would be cleaned from top to bottom. For a week, his grandmother would be a blur of rubber-gloved, overalled activity, dusting, mopping, scrubbing: silver polished, net curtains set to bleach, white linen snapping on the washing line. Casey's bedroom would be turned upside-down, all a small boy's accumulated treasures ruthlessly dragged into the light, examined, judged, found wanting, and then disposed of.

Casey never thought anything of it. He'd grown up with it; he assumed it was the norm. He continued to believe that, living his own life in much the same way, appalled and horrified by his college roommates' habits, right up until his marriage.

Lisa's standards fell far short of his grandmother's, but Casey was in love, and in no frame of mind to be critical. He let it slide until almost six months after the wedding when, with June fast approaching and spring slipping away, he'd asked Lisa, all innocence, when she was going to clean the apartment.

He still flinches from the memory.

He has an apartment to himself, these days, and a lovely woman called Lupe to keep it clean for him. Lupe and Casey's grandmother would have got along swimmingly; Lupe, were she not a good Catholic, would worship at the shrine of Pledge. Every surface is spotless; every picture straight. She once sorted all his books (although she frowns on books; they're a magnet for dust) into order of size, and Casey still feels faintly guilty at having rearranged them and ruined the symmetry. You could eat off Casey's kitchen floor, if you really wanted to although, personally, Casey would rather not.

When it's his turn to have Charlie overnight, things change a little, but not substantially. Charlie has inherited the tidy gene. He lines up his shoes by the bed, hangs his clothes neatly in the closet; his possessions are laid out in orderly rows along the dresser. When he's finished in the bathroom, there's nothing to show he's ever been in there.

Tonight, though - tonight, all that has changed.

Tonight, Casey is sitting on his couch, calmly surveying the wreck that used to be his living room. There's a pizza box oozing grease across the coffee table, crusts on the carpet; a collection of not-quite-empty beer bottles lying in small, sticky pools. The sofa cushions are wildly scattered, and spilling across the floor in no particular order are two pairs of Reeboks (one pair with the laces still tied), a bright red sweater, a teeshirt and, carrying on into the bedroom, another teeshirt, two pairs of jeans and, at the foot of the bed, a pair of boxers. (There should be another pair somewhere. Casey has no idea where. Nor does he care.)

That's to say nothing of the state of the bed itself.

Casey looks around himself at the mess, and it only makes him smile. He can't help but smile. What else can he do when the reason for all the chaos is still soundly asleep in his bed, crumpled sheet rucked up around his thighs, his lips red and swollen, the marks of Casey's fingernails scoring his back, bite marks on his shoulders and chest and hips?

It turns out that it wasn't Casey's apartment that needed spring cleaning. It was his life, and what it needed was to be picked up and shaken, turned upside-down, inside-out and backwards, have its windows and doors flung open and, for the first time that he can remember, welcome in air and sun and light and _freedom_.

And now that he has it rearranged, he finds it's exactly the way he likes it. He only wonders, now, what took him so long.

(Shhh. If you listen very carefully, you can just hear the sound of Grandma McCall, spinning madly in her grave.)

***


End file.
